The conceptions of space and time developed by early modern physics also made it possible to conceive of “work” in a new way: as the product of force and direction divided by time. Hence, “reality is nothing but the quantum of working.” [GA33: 48] Working, in turn, became conceived in the technological era in terms of ordering for its own sake, work for its own sake. Human working and the forces of nature became projected onto each other:
The name for human doing and striving, “work,” was carried over to the performance of mechanical force. Work is equated with mechanical energy. Conversely, the predominance of the physicalistic concept of work in its essentially technological meaning took effect upon the determination of human work as “performance” [Leistung]. The performance principle is an essential principle of human acting and behaving. [Ibid.]
The ancient Greeks conceived of human performing not as a way of “producing” something in the sense of manufacturing it, but rather as a way of disclosing something letting it be. The Greek concept of performing was transformed by its translation into the Latin term fungere, whence we get “function,” in the sense of a performing which involves a process which produces a result. The reality of, the real becomes, thereby, reduced to its “working,” its “performing,” its “functioning.’’ Terms that once depicted human disclosive activity became transformed into descriptions of the “activity” of natural processes. In turn, human activity was conceived as a special case of these processes.
Moreover, the ancient definition of reality as “substance,” that independent mode of presencing which defines and “produces” a living thing, was transformed by modern science into the “function” of a thing. An animal is not a self-presencing entity, then, but rather an organic “function” comprehensible within the matrix of space-time coordinates. The modern conception of work as function lets entities be conceived as abstract quanta of energy. Such a conception ignores the outward appearance of things which gives them substantial “form.” In the technological era, then, space and time have become a system of mathematical coordinates, the framing structure (Rahmenbau), which organizes in the most efficient way possible the industrial functions needed to work up standing-reserve into finished commodities. [GA53: 46ff.] Individual entities thereby disappear into quanta of energy which can be stored and switched about at will: “Grasping and seizing are the names for a unified will to domination of space and time.” [GA53: 47] The technological disclosure of things, then, reduces them to functional means for the purpose of ever greater productivity.